Wadsworth Welcomes Hartford Residents with Free Admission

Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is now offering free admission to all city residents. The program is called the Wadsworth Welcome.

Museum director Tom Loughman said the goal of the museum is to bring art and people together. The free admission program is one more way to do that.

“[It's] a message of welcome to those who live in this city that the atheneum belongs to you," Loughman said. "While the museum matters to a global arts community, while it is the largest public art museum in Connecticut and welcomes everyone with an opportunity for enjoyment and learning and self-discovery, we want to honor this special relationship in a particular way that fits with contemporary life here in Hartford.”

Mayor Luke Bronin praised the move.

“By stepping up to the plate in a big way and saying we are now going to make this historic cultural asset free and open to every resident of the city of Hartford, I think the athenaeum has added a brand new chapter to its long history of partnership with the city of Hartford," Bronin said.

Regular admission for adults is $15, while those under 18 already get in free. The Wadsworth Welcome program will run through June of next year and then be reevaluated. The museum’s corporate sponsor, Aetna, will help market the new program to city residents.

It might seem odd for a museum boasting one of the nation's largest collections of the Hudson River School, a 19th-century art movement celebrating the beauty of America's outdoors, to document parking lots and discarded rubber tires.

The exhibit is huge -- 140 objects -- including paintings, drawings, photographs, film clips, posters, cartoons, even artifacts from old Coney Island attractions.

The exhibit's curator, as well as the Wadsworth Atheneum's chief curator, Robin Jaffee Frank, grew up going to Coney Island. She believes that for artists in this exhibition, Coney Island was more than just a strip of sand in Brooklyn.

"Rather it's about a singular place in the American imagination," said Jaffee Frank. "What I have found looking at the works we've put together is that many of these artists seem to see in Coney Island-a prism of the American experience."